The Spark

by Kristine Barnett

  During that first call, I told Dr. Treffert about the loneliness Jake was experiencing. In response, he offered to introduce Jake to another eight-year-old prodigy. The two boys were gifted in different areas, but they shared many of the same interests and had similar development patterns. Dr. Treffert thought that they might get along and be able to relate to each other in a way that neither could with others their age. I could barely wait to get off the phone to call the other mom, but it turned out she didn’t want to make a date for the boys. Her son, she explained, was too busy to make new friends. His music practice and touring schedule simply didn’t permit it.

  I was shocked. Nobody knows better than I do that a gifted kid is self-motivated. I never once made Jake do math or learn physics or astronomy, and I’m sure that other kid’s mom never had to force him to practice his instrument. I’m the biggest proponent out there of allowing children to do what they love; it’s the cornerstone of everything I do. But in all things, there has to be a balance.

  “Physics will be there tomorrow,” I always tell Jake. “That math isn’t going anywhere.” The same is true for chess or music or art. I’m sure that nobody was forcing Bobby Fischer to play chess every waking minute when he was a child; that’s probably what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world. But when that’s the case, I believe it’s a parent’s job to close up the chessboard and send the kid outside to play. A child needs to have friends his own age; he can’t discover who he is in a vacuum.

  Despite all our efforts, the loneliness and boredom of third grade eventually got to Jake. He was desperate to learn, and school seemed only to be getting in the way. He’d stay up until all hours reading in bed, no matter how many times we went and turned out the light. Then in the morning, he didn’t want to go to school. The compromises we’d asked him to accept between what he had to do and what he loved to do no longer seemed in balance. The vivid, engaged, excited child who chattered about asteroids from the backseat of the car—that was my Jake. The kid I was kissing goodbye at the bus stop every morning seemed like his shadow.

  When he got home from school, instead of playing with his friends in the neighborhood, eight-year-old Jake would squeeze himself into one of the cubes in a bookshelf we had in the daycare. When parents arrived to pick up their kids, they’d find him crammed in there. Some of them even thought it was amusing.

  But there was nothing funny or cute about it. I was deeply concerned. This was true autistic behavior. I felt as if I was losing him again.

  Saved by the Stars

  I called Stephanie Westcott, the psychologist who’d first given us Jake’s autism diagnosis. She listened as I told her what was going on, and she didn’t mince words: “It sounds like he’s bored, Kristine. You have to engage him. Has he expressed an interest in anything recently?”

  That was easy. Jake had been pestering me about algebra for more than a year. Unfortunately, third-grade math meant multiplication tables and long division, not the algebra he was so desperate to learn. I couldn’t help him. By third grade, he’d blown way past any math I’d ever learned. As the math and science he loved had gotten more and more complex, Jake had left us behind. The only help I could offer was to listen while he wrestled with the problems and tried to work them out himself.

  So I called the school. Teaching was what they did, and Jake needed a teacher. Maybe there was a gifted math class he could join? They invited us to come in for a meeting to discuss some options.

  Warning bells went off as soon as I saw how many people were assembled there. Why did the school psychologist need to be in the room when we were there to talk about math?

  The meeting started civilly enough. Michael and I explained how desperate Jake was to learn algebra, and we shared our frustration that we couldn’t help.

  “He’ll have plenty of time to learn that material when the gifted program starts in fourth grade. But in the meantime, we might be able to get him some extra assistance if we reopen the IEP.”

  I was dumbfounded. An IEP? I thought we’d left that conversation behind in kindergarten. Jake’s desire to learn was not an expression of a need for services. This wasn’t a kid who needed extra help because he couldn’t sit in a chair. Jake was a straight-A student.

  “But he doesn’t need assistance. He needs resources.”

  “An IEP might be the way to get him those resources.”

  I still didn’t understand. “Why are we talking about special ed? Is Jake disruptive in class? Is he not able to communicate? Is he not playing with his friends at recess?”

  “No, no, of course not. He’s a model student, and he’s got lots of friends. There’s been no problem with Jake at all.”

  “Does he need occupational therapy? Physical therapy? Speech?”

  Again the answer was no.

  “Then what is it? Why are we talking about an IEP?”

  It was the alphabet cards all over again. I had come because my son had been begging me, for two years, to learn more about a school subject that I couldn’t help him with. He needed resources to learn, and I’d come to his school to get those resources, but they were saying that to get them, we’d have to put Jake back in the special needs box.

  “I think we’re done here,” I said. “Excuse me.” And I walked out of the room.

  Michael came running after me, utterly shocked. “Kristine! Come back in and finish the meeting.”

  “I’m not going back in,” I told him. “We’re done. I don’t want anything to do with any conversation pertaining to my son and special ed. That’s not why I’m here. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  I didn’t blame Jake’s school or the teachers. In fact, I was grateful to them for their work and dedication. They were trying to do the right thing for Jake. But in my heart, I knew that opening up an IEP was not the way to go. I knew that I might be making a mistake, just as I had known that when I pulled him from Life Skills. Even though I do believe the mother gut is always right, maternal intuition doesn’t come with warning lights and buzzers. In this case, however, the path was clear to me.

  I hired my aunt, a high school math teacher, to teach Jake algebra. When he quickly surpassed what she could comfortably teach him, I realized that a little math tutoring wasn’t going to solve the bigger problem. Stephanie Westcott was right: Jake was bored. He needed something or someone to truly capture his imagination, to encourage him, to challenge him. The advanced astronomy lectures at the Holcomb Observatory had worked to bring him out of his shell before, so back we went, the whole family this time, with Wesley and baby Ethan in tow.

  The change in Jake was dramatic. Those were beautiful days that the five of us spent together at the planetarium. The boys would eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on a picnic blanket on the grounds, and then we’d attend the presentation of the week. I’d bring as many car sticker books as I could fit into my bag to keep Wesley and Ethan busy, but Jake was engrossed. We’d always end up back at the giant telescope at the top of the building, with Jake looking out at the stars.

  Those trips to the observatory became a new family tradition, exactly the kind of happy, ordinary childhood experience I wanted the boys to have. Ethan was a bit young, but Wesley was quickly engaged. The more he learned, the more interested he became, and it wasn’t long before he and Jake would spend the drive home talking about issues in advanced astronomy as if they were at a professional conference. Seriously, I’d think, catching Mike’s eye, who are these people?

  Wes and Ethan were happy, but Jake—well, we felt as if we’d saved Jake. Almost immediately after we resumed our visits, his social life picked up again. After school, he happily headed out to ride his bike or play tag with his friends. I’d learned my lesson. As long as Jake could get a good dose of serious astronomy, he could keep up with the social end of things in school. As I had seen so many times with the typical kids at the daycare and the autistic kids at Little Light, as well as over and over with Jake himself, all of his other skills would come
along naturally as long as he was doing what he loved.

  Then, right when we were back on track, the observatory closed for the winter. There had to be another way to kindle Jake’s interest. We couldn’t lose the gains we’d just made. Watching the PBS series Cosmos and hanging out on the NASA website wouldn’t be enough; Jake needed to be completely immersed. So I searched for another planetarium.

  Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) was right down the road from Butler University, where the Holcomb Observatory was located. Although IUPUI didn’t have a planetarium, it did offer astronomy courses. And so I soon found myself on the phone with Professor Edward Rhoads, who taught a freshman course on the solar system there.

  I would never have been brave enough to ask a favor for myself, but because I was advocating for Jake, I was fearless. I told Professor Rhoads that I had an autistic son who loved astronomy and that we’d had a lot of success with him socially and in other areas when he was able to engage in the activities he loved. Would he consider allowing Jake to sit in on his class? I explained that this wasn’t about academics or furthering Jake’s education, just that I thought this class would make him happy, and indirectly help his social skills.

  I knew how crazy my request sounded. This was a university course, after all, and Jake was eight years old. But I also knew that getting permission for him to attend this five-week class was my best chance to keep him out of the bookshelf. At one point in my conversation with Professor Rhoads, I even suggested that perhaps we could sit in the hall outside his classroom and eavesdrop on his lectures. That didn’t turn out to be necessary. In an extraordinary act of generosity, Professor Rhoads agreed to allow Jake to sit in on his freshman course on Saturn, on the strict condition that I would take him out of the classroom at the very first sign of any disruptive behavior.

  It was an afternoon class, which meant that I had to pull Jake out of his last third-grade class about twenty minutes early. Fingers crossed behind my back, I told his teacher that he had a series of doctor’s appointments, hoping that she wouldn’t ask for a note. In the car, Jake said, “Well, he is a doctor.” It was almost a joke, a rare foray into humor for Jake, who hadn’t quite tapped into that part of himself yet. I took it as a good sign.

  IUPUI is a commuter college, and many of the students are older part-timers. As Jake and I made our way into the small classroom where the course would be held, I suspect that most of the attendees assumed that I was a student whose child care arrangements had fallen through. Although I felt sure that I was doing the right thing for Jake, I was still nervous about how the afternoon would unfold. Jake might fidget, drag his chair across the linoleum floor, or somehow otherwise make too much noise. If he did, there was nowhere to hide. So my heart was beating hard when Professor Rhoads took his place at the front of the classroom. He was slightly disheveled, introverted, and passionate about his subject—the very picture of the absentminded professor. He reminded me a little of Jake.

  Thankfully, as soon as Professor Rhoads began to speak, I could feel Jake’s body relax, and when I looked over at him, I could see that he was the happiest I had seen him in months—concentrated and intent, but peaceful.

  Professor Rhoads had a deck of slides, mostly Hubble Space Telescope pictures of Saturn, which were mesmerizing in their beauty. While clicking through, he asked the class to interpret what they saw.

  “What is this black dot in front of Saturn?” he asked the class. Nobody answered.

  Jake scribbled in the margin of his notebook and pushed it over to me: “If I know, can I say?”

  “If nobody else answers,” I wrote back. “And raise your hand.”

  Jake waited a moment, and then his hand went up. The professor turned to him and nodded. “It’s Titan’s shadow,” Jake said.

  The other kids in the class exchanged glances. I was a little taken aback myself. I was surprised not that Jake knew the answer (by that point, nothing Jake knew surprised me), but by his manner. He wasn’t nervous or the slightest bit self-conscious to be participating in such a discussion in a university classroom. He seemed totally self-possessed and confident. He seemed like he belonged there.

  During that first class, he answered one or two other questions, always waiting to make sure that none of the enrolled students wanted to try. I could tell that Professor Rhoads was beginning to understand that this was more than whimsy on my part and that Jake was more than a little kid who’d caught a few episodes of Nova.

  The Jake I went home with that night was a completely different kid from the one in the bookshelf. The days we had class were the only days I didn’t have to try twenty times to wake him up in the morning. “We’ve got class tonight” worked better than any alarm clock. As we drove to class, Jake would physically lean forward in his seat as if he couldn’t wait to get there.

  Toward the end of the second class, Jake scrawled a note to me in the margin of his notebook: “I have a question.”

  I wrote back: “Save it until the end, and make it a good one. Don’t waste the professor’s time with something we can look up at home.”

  After class was dismissed, Jake waited patiently until the rest of the kids had asked Professor Rhoads their questions. When it was finally his turn, I couldn’t help noticing that he was dancing a little, shifting his weight from foot to foot in a gesture immediately recognizable to every mom. It had been a long lecture, and he’d had a Coke in the car on the way there.

  Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one who noticed, and there may even have been the faintest trace of a smile on Professor Rhoads’s lips when he said, “Science is important, Jake. But there are some things that are even more important than science. If you’d like to use the restroom, I promise that I’ll be here to answer your question when you get back.”

  Jake’s question concerned the low gravity on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, and what that meant for the possibility of life there. I didn’t know then that Enceladus is considered one of the most likely spots in our solar system for life to exist (it has an ocean), but I could tell from the way Professor Rhoads responded to the question that Jake had done what I’d suggested and made it a good one.

  By the third class, Jake’s participation had become a kind of shared joke. If nobody’s hand went up when Professor Rhoads asked a question, he’d wait a few beats and then turn to Jake with an eyebrow raised. More often than not, Jake was right, and by the time the semester was over, he was openly participating in the class. Jake has never been a particularly big kid, but he’d never looked smaller to me than he did up at the whiteboard next to those college students.

  When the professor announced that the class would be breaking up into groups to come up with a final presentation, everyone was clamoring to work with Jake. He took the presentation seriously—he did all the research and put together a killer PowerPoint presentation. This was his first exposure to college students, though, and he started to get anxious when he realized that his partners weren’t putting any work into the assignment. He didn’t understand what was going on. It fell to me to explain that in the best-case scenario, they were probably leaving their own work to the very last minute.

  “And in the worst?” he asked.

  “Well, honey, they can see that you’ve done a good job with that PowerPoint presentation and that it’s all ready to go. They probably think that they don’t have to do much at all.”

  Jake thought about that for a minute and then decided to tell his fellow students that they could have his PowerPoint slide deck, but they’d have to do the research themselves to figure out what it meant, because he wasn’t going to participate in the presentation. He wrote Professor Rhoads an email explaining why he wouldn’t be there. It was an impressive show of ethics, and I smiled a little to myself. I suspected it wouldn’t be the last time that overwhelmed, sleep-deprived college students would try to hitch a ride on Jake’s coattails. Maybe the next group would have better luck.

  Pop-Tarts and Plan
ets

  They had strawberry Pop-Tarts in the vending machines at IUPUI. Munching a Pop-Tart while waiting for his astronomy class became the highlight of Jake’s week.

  When Professor Rhoads’s class was over, Jake took another freshman survey course, this one on the solar system, taught by Dr. Jay Pehl. I liked him immediately. He had a kind, friendly face and hands covered with chalk, and he was known for carrying a handkerchief packed with candy in his pocket. Dr. Pehl’s class was much bigger than the one Jake had taken with Professor Rhoads and took place in an enormous auditorium. I emailed in advance to ask if we could attend. Dr. Pehl responded by saying that as long as we didn’t disturb anyone, he probably wouldn’t even notice that we were there.

  After the first class, Jake was hooked. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get to the next couple of classes because Michael had to work. But I knew how important it was to Jake, so the following week I brought all three boys with me and took the two youngest for a walk while Jake sat in. It was weird to watch him walk away from me into the lecture hall. He was physically dwarfed by the other young people swarming around him, and I could see that his shoelace was untied. I’d never left him anywhere before, except at elementary school or a friend’s house, and this seemed very different to me. I was there ten minutes early to pick him up at the auditorium door.

  Jake didn’t talk at all during those early classes with Dr. Pehl, but he was eager to sign up for the next class in the astronomy curriculum, Stars and Galaxies, also taught by Dr. Pehl. Early on in the second class, Jake raised his hand. It’s well-known, he said, that binary stars exchange gases; the gas from one star transfers to another and causes changes in the second star. But since the second star gets bigger, Jake asked, is it possible that some of the gases could go back to the first star and cause even more changes there?